China’s turning off the (You)Tube again

China has blocked access to YouTube, again – coincident to a denunciation of this video that appears to show the death of a Tibetan protester after a beating by Chinese police last year. This comes a year after a similar shutdown, again related to footage of Tibetan protests.

Given that the video in question has proliferated across multiple sites – and the probable un-blocking that’ll happen soon – there’s the question of why the Chinese government bothers to block YouTube at all. The footage, while brutal, won’t have the strategic consequences of, say, the Abu Ghraib photos: I’d wager that international hearts-and-minds are resigned to the fact that the occupation of Tibet has been and will likely will continue to be marked by some measure of brutality.

An article from The Register, dated from last year’s shutdown, offers a better answer: this may be a means of keeping the lid on internal nationalist sentiment, or at least a means of taking away the tinder. In a year of economic disruption – disruption with profound global interdependencies – there’s danger in letting nationalism run rampant, especially over the echo chambers of the Internet.